Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - Portable? 33
Thanks to GameGossip for reprinting a press release announcing Radica's forthcoming portable electronic game called 20Q, licensed from the 20Q.net website. The game seeks to guess an object you're thinking of by asking you 20 questions, starting with "Is it classified as Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other or Unknown?" The site is billed as "The neural-net on the Internet", and since it's claimed that "20Q.net is a learning system; the more it is played, the smarter it gets", it'll be interesting to see if Radica's portable version tries to incorporate any learning attributes.
It Can't Work Without It (Score:1, Interesting)
Oldest game ever! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:2)
We had to write an learning animal guessing game of this style for an assignment on tree structures for our algorithms and data structures paper at university. Of course with a quick few modifications it was turned into the lecturer guessing game:
Is your lecturer
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:5, Insightful)
and not only that, the "learning" isn't anything more adding a discriminator a search tree.
The original used a binary search tree -- each parent question branched to two child nodes, one for "Yes" answers, one for "No" answers.
The version at 20q.net uses a tree where each node has six children (Yes, No, Unknown, Irrelevant, Probably, Doubtful), and makes "guesses" probably based on some accumulation of -- I'm just guessing myself here -- the fuzzier (neither "Yes" nor "No") answers.
So it just classifies human knowledge, and -- big surprise -- it gets "confused" where reasonable people disagree about what attributes the guessed-at object has.
So it's nothing revolutionary technically.
And there's no reason to make it into a single-use portable, given that it could be programmed for any existing portable -- Palm Pilot, Zaurus, Gameboy -- limited only by the size of the database said portable could accommodate. The whole point of Turing machines is that they can be any (programmable) machine -- why this should be a stand-alone, other than because marketing thinks it would sell, I have no idea. (Maybe they can sell stand-alone tic-tac-toe machines too?)
And it's no breakthrough epistemologically: schemes for the classification of all human knowledge have been a hobby-horse of talented zealots at least since the Enlightenment (and come to think of it, wasn't that what St. Thomas Aquinas was up to too?).
Roget's Thesaurus is an example of one of the few classifications of knowledge to actually be useful, but let's not forget various plans by various philosophers to create artificial languages based on "natural" taxonomies of knowledge, or "mathematical" systems encompassing all knowledge, with syntax that would make false statements impossible, and other grandiose plans.
So far, these plans have all foundered on disagreement between reasonable men over what the boundaries and connections between concepts "really" are, and difficulties dealing with different domains of knowledge, to the point that most if not all have had little practical use (Roget's being useful not for its original purpose, an exhaustive classification of everything, but instead as a catalog of synonyms and antonyms best employed by poets and rhetoricians, not scientists or philosophers.)
Of course, just because it's neither new nor particularly noteworthy, does not mean that the US Patent Office might not grant it a patent. But that's another problem altogether.
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:1, Funny)
Well, 20 Questions usually founders like this:
Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?
Animal.
Is it taller than my Mum?
No.
Sqyugrhnuevuievio?
Yes.
HA HA THIS GAME SUCKS?
No.
Is it a peepee?
No.
What was it?
U R DUM.
Please input a question that would distinguish a peepee from a U R DUM:
0wned.
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:2)
20Q has no way to differentiate the two, and will just swing back and forth between the two confusedly, probably arriving at some weird algamation between the two.
Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:2)
Have you used 20Q.net? The thing is certainly not the binary-tree-in-BASIC you're thinking of. It gets the right answer before you think it could possibly know. They've tuned this algorithm over several years, and it's smart.
Pangolins (Score:2)
Half interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I love 20Q.net. (Score:2)
Uncommon Knowledge about a grapefruit
Does it come in different colors? I say Yes.
Would you use it daily? I say Probably.
Is it a predator? I say Probably.
Is it originally from Europe? I say Probably.
Does it have paws? I say Yes.
Is it made from cellulose? I say Probably.
Is it delivered? I say Yes.
Can it growl? I say Yes.
Would you touch it with a 10-foot pole? I say Doubtful.
Was it ever alive? I say No.
Does it come in many varieti
Re:I love 20Q.net. (Score:2)
It's really good (Score:3, Funny)
Damn! Here it goes again!
No, I haven't RTFA
I'm not sure how... (Score:3, Funny)
its borken (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:its borken (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but the traditional 'first question' in 20 questions is the "animal, vegetable, or mineral" question. Granted, they stretch it a bit by adding Other and Unknown, but it's still in the traditional spirit of the game.
Re:its borken (Score:2)
Re:its borken (Score:2)
Plus, 20Q is tuned to answer yes-no questions, and it doesn't get much information from the first one.
Re:its borken (Score:2)
Uh, in the best case, they get log(N) questions for the price of one, where N is the number of multiple choice options, and the log is base 2, of course. Around HERE, serious players are made to start with
1) is it mineral?
2b) is it animal?
For their expanded, illegal first question, you'd do something like
1) is
Close, but no cigar (Score:1)
I am guessing that it is a urinal?
It wasn't that far out, was it?
YAW.
Really easy to beat (Score:1)
Spontaneous knowledge (Score:2)
For example, I played it with the answer "a search engine". Here's what it concluded:
The mandelbrot set is probably not made of plastic
The mandelbrot set probably doesn't live in the desert
You might not wear the mandelbrot set
Final proof (Score:1)
I played a game where the word I thought of was "pussy" and the guesses? 1) Software, 2) Internet
Scary...
Well lets look at its failures (Score:1)
Nope Time machine
Nope
What use is this thing?
Slashdot at work: (Score:1)
Honestly works (Score:2)